“Have you met Skelton’s sister?”

“Yeah, she’s like Skelton, but with long hair.”

“She has the biting wit of Skelton, and the looks he missed out on, but she’s not as tall and she doesn’t have his eyes.”

“Oh my god, have you ever looked into Skelton’s eyes?”

“Yes, they sparkle like diamonds.”

“It was like the first time I heard The Beatles.”

I was returning to the office after purchasing my daily coke zero from the Asian grocer, and as I was waiting for the elevator,  I made eye contact with a group of six people entering the lobby from the street. The moment the lift doors opened, I got in and pressed “Level 2″. As I ascended to my floor, I pressed my ear to the doors and listened to the six people as they waited below in the lobby and bitched about me.

“What happened?”

“Didn’t she hold the lift?”

“Oh my god, what a bitch.”

The truth is, normally I would hold the lift. But sometimes, I feel like if I do one more good deed, the karmic balance of the earth will implode due to my profligate saintliness. I give blood. I donate to charities. I give my coffee change to homeless people. I pick up other people’s litter when I see it. I believe in freedom of speech and same sex marriage and doing unto others and random acts of kindness. But every so often, I just need to be a cunt.

Every 6 months, I go to the dentist. My dentist’s name is Fred. He has an enormous belly and wears a white coat, so he resembles a giant pillow. I rest my head against his soft stomach while he peers into my mouth, pokes around, and says “You have a sensationally healthy mouth.” This takes roughly 45 seconds and $75 and then I am free to go. Every 6 months, the exchange is identical. Well, it was until this week.

On Monday, I went to see Fred for my regular check up. As I nestled my head against his tummy, he peered into my mouth for longer than usual. Then he scraped the side of one of my teeth. A mild, yet definite ache spread throughout my jaw. Fred scraped another tooth and it hurt too. He stood up and loomed over me.

“What the fuck is going on here?” he asked.
“Nothing, I swear, it was one time!”I cried uncertainly.
“Your gums are receding, girl.” Fred said.

Anytime somebody calls me “girl”, I know I am either in trouble or they are hitting on me. This was the former.

“That’s impossible,” I replied, “I’m only twenty-three. I have perfect teeth. I take real good care of them too.  Look at them, they’re beautiful.”
“Look again,” Fred answered, and peeled my bottom lip away from my jaw. Sure enough, the gums on either side of my mouth were slowly wearing away, exposing the roots of my teeth, which were beginning to turn a distinct shade of dark yellow.
“What the hell is that?” I asked and Fred replied, “Decay.”

Decay? Decay was what happened to corpses buried inside coffins in the ground. It involved maggots and bad smells and smug relatives. And now it was happening inside my mouth.

“What do I do?” I asked Fred. I didn’t want to ask too many questions, because for some reason I believed that the less I knew, the less serious the entire situation.

“Put this cream on your gums at night,” he said, handing me a small tube labeled $25, “And go see a goddamn specialist.”

After I paid and left the surgery, I sat in my car and cried for twenty minutes. I hadn’t realised how much of my self esteem was tied to my teeth up until then. At that moment, my entire personality seemed to hinge on the quality of my pearly whites. If I lost a single molar, I would lose my sense of humour, or compassion, or balance.

I calmed down eventually, drove home and made banana muffins. I rubbed the cream on my gums every fifteen minutes. I googled “causes of gum recession” and was confused that none of the typical reasons applied to me. As soon as my brother got home from work, I made him look inside my mouth and inspect the decay on my exposed teeth.

“That’s gross,” he observed, “And weird. Your teeth look fine everywhere else.”

“I know!” I agreed, “They’re perfectly nice looking on the outside, but underneath they are rotten and ugly and slowly dying.”

“Kind of like the rest of you,” he replied.

“Can we go home yet?” I whined to my mother, as she squinted at me through her camera lens.

“Smile, darling!” she encouraged as I wailed and thrashed in the arms of Scooby-Doo. I hated Wonderland, despite my constant nagging to go there. I endured each visit because I was obsessed with fairy floss and I hadn’t yet figured out that you could buy it from any standard lolly shop. Once I’d gotten my sugar fix, the theme park’s crowds made me nervous, the rides didn’t seem safe, and the life-sized cartoon characters roaming the grounds and posing for photos completely terrified me. Most kids ran to these characters, swarmed them and jostled for a hug with their new furry friend. However, I was under no illusion that these beings were my favourite cartoon-network personalities. I wasn’t fooled by the costumes or the funny voices. I knew exactly what they were: creepy adults wearing full-body suits in order to  lure children into close physical contact.

Which is why I ran from Scooby-Doo as soon as he let me drop to the ground. I ran straight into Fred Flinstone, and when he too tried to scoop me into his burly arms, thick with muscles from whittling away hours in a prison gym while serving his pedophilia sentence, I punched him in the crotch and turned to my parents.

“Can we go home now?” I asked. And we left.

I went to my 5 year highschool reunion last weekend, and I was really excited to see how all my old class-mates had grown and matured into well-adjusted young adults. Apparently nothing really changes though.

classmate, finishing up a boring story: “…but that was when my license was suspended, so I didn’t drive anyway.”

me: “How did you lose your license?”

classmate: “High range DUI.”

me: “How embarrassing.”

classmate: “Nah, it was fucken great. Mum dropped me at the pub every night so I could still get pissed!”

me: “I’m so glad this experience has humbled you and made you wiser. The legal system should be proud.”

me: how long did it take you to get home from the farm?

ex-boyfriend: well I stopped for an hour at the pub, so I got home two hours later than if I’d driven straight through.

me: no, you would have been one hour later than if you’d driven straight through.

ex-boyfriend: nah, two hours. One for the time I stopped, and one for the distance I would have traveled if I hadn’t stopped.

me: that’s completely illogical, you weren’t moving backwards at the pub.

ex-boyfriend: what would you know? Women can’t drive for shit.

My mother corners me in the kitchen and says “You’ll never believe what just happened!”

Certain that she is right as my imagination could never conjure up something as spectacularly mudane as what she’s about to share, I smile politely.

“So I was emailing Kerry, and thinking about calling her, but I thought I’d wait until after lunch. But then the phone rang and, no shit, it was Kerry! We were just chatting, then after a while, she said ‘Why did you call me?’ and I said ‘Kerry, you called me.‘ And she said ‘No, I didn’t,’ and I said, ‘Yes, you did!’ Anyway, we finally figured out that while Kerry was cooking, she got a message on her answering machine that sounded just like me, and that’s why she was asking why I had called her!”

Silence.

“Because she got a voice message on her answering machine!”

Crickets.

“Because it sounded just like me!”

By which point, I’ve usually left the room to slit my wrists.